Eh bien ce pays [i.e., Israël] n’est pas fondé sur les questions ! Il n’existerait pas si les sionistes interrogeaient la justesse de leur cause, leur droit de s’emparer des terres ou s’ils demandaient la permission de coloniser les sommets des collines et de recouvrir les flancs de vergers exotiques. Ce pays est fondé sur des réponses. Solutions. Audacieuses. Odieuses même ! Soixante-dix ans de solutions.
Les questions sont dangereuses. Elles imposent la nuance. Elles angoissent. Fatales dans une guerre. Et le monde n’est qu’un vaste champ de guerre. Les questions freinent la marche de l’histoire. Sirènes, elles chantent, détournent les troupes, font courir des frissons, perforent les ordres clairs, nets, de réticences.
this passage from the Palestinian Canadian novelist Yara El-Ghadban’s Je suis Ariel Sharon highlights both the novel’s appeal as a rhetorical object and its limitations.
the novel begins with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke in 2006 and narrates a series of visions Sharon experiences while comatose between 2006 and his death in 2014. the visions come in the form of three women: his mother, Véra; his second wife, Lily; and Rita, a mysterious woman whose spirit guides (and torments) Sharon throughout. it is, in effect, a kind of anti-Zionist A Christmas Carol, except that Sharon is not revived at the end.
it is, as I noted at the beginning, a rhetorically appealing novel, from Véra’s laying out of a politics of doikayt (though not in quite so many words) against the Zionist negation of the diaspora to Lily’s chilling celebration of violence to Rita’s turning Sharon’s worldview inside out:
Pourquoi rester prudemment triste quand il est heureux ? Pourquoi se méfier du succès? Vivre comme si l’échec, pire la complaisance, est toujours aux aguets ? Pourquoi chaque guerre de gagnée n’est qu’une bombe à retardement ? Une menace existetielle? Chaque anniversaire d’Israël, un de volé à sa disparition ? Pourquoi à Pâque, lui, ses parents, ses enfants, se disaient, se disent, se diront toujours « l’an prochain à Jérusalem », même s’ils mangent, baisent, chient, dorment chaque nuit à Jérusalem depuis 1967 ? Pourquoi toute sa vie, alors qu’il est né sur cette terre, a grandi sur cette terre et mourra sans doute — si jamais cette femme le libère — sur cette terre, a-t-il toujours été, l’est, le sera pour l’éternité un exilé ?
it suffers, though, from a fundamentally liberal-idealist understanding of Zionism — one that posits, as in the above example, presented through Sharon’s perspective — that the problem with Zionism is, in effect, a lack of empathy or consideration. if Zionists had just thought more about the fact that Palestine was already populated by people, including Jews, who had been there for thousands of years, they wouldn’t have gone through with their colonial project. if this position seemed at all tenable once, viewed from a distance, the last year has been a sharp reminder this analysis simply doesn’t hold up. this undercuts the novel’s critique of Zionism: it is clear that even “liberal” Zionists do not experience life in Israel in the way the novel posits — as a paradoxical continuation of exile — and it is clear Zionism is not a failure of empathy but an active antipathy rooted in white supremacy. there is no secret desire for self-annihilation.
it does, however, also pose a pressing question: is it possible to transform the settler, to eliminate “settler” as a structural position and to make the settler into something else, someone whose existence is not predicated on violent dispossession? can the settler abandon the life they have known and the person they have been and become something else? can an Israeli become Palestinian?
the novel’s response is ambivalent but ultimately, I think, hopeful.
L’arabe est en lui, comme il est en vous.
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